🎧 Connecting the Dots: Polkadot & Interoperability
Round Table Recap: April 4th, 2023
Russian DeFi
April 21, 2023
This Twitter Space recap features Eric - a crypto expert who started his journey as a trader and co-founded a decentralized storage startup.
He joined Parody in 2019, the parent company behind Polkadot, and now works at Analog, building a blockchain to fix operability between Layer 1s and 2s. He sees vast potential in cross-chain messaging, but more resources are needed to educate people on its applications.
Eric predicts significant development in the space within a year as L2 composability and Layer 0s mature.
You can listen to the full audio here
Keep reading 🍿👇️
Panel:
Eric Wang @ericwang1215
Kadeem Clarke @Crypto_Clarke
Introduction:
Eric started his journey in crypto around 5-6 years ago while he was studying his Ph.D. at Standford.
One of his friends had made a few million from trading shitcoins.
After seeing the craze and dove into the rabbit hole, he got hooked and put all his eggs into crypto.
Eric started as a trader with personal funds, and then later on, he co-founded a decentralized storage start-up where, as a team, they raised 2.1M.
After encountering issues, Eric and his team had internal problems and had to shut the start-up down.
Afterwards, he joined Parody 2019, the parent company behind the Polkadot protocol.
They focus on the forward marketing, DD, and engineering efforts for the Polkadot ecosystem.
He initially joined as assistant dev lead, where he would reach out to teams and convince them to join.
Following this, he became head of strategic growth, focusing on high-priority projects to convince them to join the ecosystem.
What gave you faith in Polkadot?
Eric says at that time, people needed to understand more about alternative L1s, and Ethereum had most of the market share.
He emphasizes how no ecosystem was fully functional, but as Cosmos and Polkadot came around, they offered the ability for devs to build chains to communicate.
Eric believed this made the most sense to how the world would adopt.
Eric says that Polkadot is unique because it starts with the idea of the relay chain, which then connects all of these other blockchains together.
He talks about the overarching protocol, XCMP, which couples with shared security which guarantees in the ecosystem.
🎧️ Exploring benefits of Polkadot’s unique design 👇️
About Analog:
Eric works at Analog, one of the projects trying to fix generalized operability between Layer 1s and 2s.
He explains that instead of solving just the interoperability between parachains (What Polkadot offer), it gives the ability for parachains to communicate with rollups which is unique.
Analog is building a blockchain built on the SDK so that Polkadot parachains can relay messages from a Polkadot parachain to a rollup.
Eric explains this is important and can bring massive potential to the industry.
The opportunity in the cross-chain space?
Eric says that the most used cross-chain function is the cross-chain bridge.
This allows you to send a fungible token from one chain to another.
He uses the example of all these bridges being hacked last year from one chain to another.
Eric explains that cross-chain messaging can solve general message passing between chains.
He believes that the applications of these are limitless.
🎧️ Impact of Cross-Chain Messaging in traditional & crypto worlds 👇️
What are some of the live ecosystems right now?
Eric says Polkadot and Cosmos are the best.
He also mentions Avalanche and subnets but does acknowledge the messaging protocol is very primitive.
🎧️ Interoperability in the Crypto Space 👇️
Unlock the possibilities of cross-chain messaging 👇️
Plans for Analog over the next year?
Eric explains that the first testnet and initial partnerships are being released this year.
Additionally, the goal is to launch the mainnet with some big partners over the coming months.
He also says that the maturity of developers and talking to teams about how Analog is the best platform to build on top of is what they are aiming to do.
🎧️ “What stops Analog from going into the graveyard?”
How can this work in the trad world?
Eric says it makes building more straightforward.
He mentions how cross-chain and omni-chain allow you to build one dApp and work across all the blockchains.
He uses the example of building on a private ledger but wanting to interact with DeFi and having the ‘bridge’ to do it.
Eric explains that the space should scale and adapt as the tech develops.
He says that because of the lack of infrastructure blocks out there at the minute, it’s hard to ramp up adoption for cross-chain.
What are some resources out there to teach people?
Eric emphasizes it’s one of the big problems in the space.
He says there is no talk on the applications that can aid developer creativity.
Eric says if there were a way to point people in the direction of the content, it would help the interoperability space and reiterate its importance.
When do you see we will see more development in the space?
Eric believes the development will happen within a year because the L2 composability problem is becoming so big that it’ll be fixed soon.
He says that as more Layer 0s become more mature, more dApps will catch on and adopt more interoperability, pushing more applications out.
Eric mentions how zK stuff and parachains will become more valued.
How is it more secure?
Eric explains how intelligent contract monitoring on each chain is the most important thing.
He says that at Analog, they have an API that allows two blockchains to interface so that every node in the ecosystem is holding each additional blockchain. These give the developers productivity in their security automatically through smart contracts.
🎧️ How Analog approaches cross chain security 👇️
What the opportunities are going forward in the overall space:
Eric believes we could see more cross-chain NFTs that will be based around NFT bridges.
This means you could hold NFTs on Ethereum but be able to lend on Solana as an example.
Eric explains that omni-chain NFTs would enable this and increase the usability of smart chain contracts cross-chain.